The military and law enforcement (LE) communities are more frequently facing non-traditional threats from mines, booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs); all of which have the potential to be combined with lethal gases, chemicals and even nuclear material to form weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
In the past, in an attempt to make training more relevant, the military and LE communities have relied on potentially dangerous pyrotechnic simulators or complex, expensive, and/or unrealistic electronic simulators.
In the civilian community, recreational scenario gamers (paintball, airsoft, etc.) are always looking for more “realistic” yet safe ways to replicate scenarios encountered by the military and LE communities. Part of the “realism” is scenarios where ordnance threats are present and potentially (simulated) dangerous.
To improvise, the civilian community has had to settle for “dud” simulators that relied on referees to make wound/kill calls or more recently, rely on mines/grenades that expel a marking paint that would create a simulated fragmentation on the victim(s), but provide no other visual or audible cue that a detonation has occurred. They also had the option of using cheap and potentially dangerous PVC mines that could not withstand the rigors of multiple, even simulated, explosions and therefore were a liability to their users.
In either case, there were no simulators that combined all of the most desirable elements in one device to provide an explosion simulator that is: “realistic” (loud report and visual signal/simulated smoke), safe (non pyrotechnic), durable, inexpensive to purchase and operate (reusable), simple, and reliable.
As a result, there became a demand from both the mil/LE communities as well as the recreational scenario community, for simulators that combined these desired elements into both special purpose and general purpose explosion simulators.